The US Navy made a very important announcement regarding their use of 3D print technology.
In a press release last week, they said:
“In a decisive move to accelerate warfighting capability and eliminate industrial bottlenecks, the Navy released new technical requirements on August 11 designed to rapidly scale the use of metallic 3D-printed materials across the submarine enterprise. The new standards strip away legacy administrative and engineering hurdles, clearing the launchpad for Additive Manufacturing (AM) to be integrated directly into submarine construction, maintenance, and combat-ready repair at unprecedented speeds.”
Specifically, they approved PPD 802-8436658, which includes the new standards. It’s important to note that they are not simply deleting regulations and heading into the unknown here; the document includes standards that still must be met in order to produce parts of the required quality.
The US Navy and other military organizations have long been testing 3D print technologies from a variety of providers. It seems that now all of that testing has resulted in a seismic shift: they will now increasingly use AM for submarine production — officially.
This is truly massive news for the 3D print industry, because it literally opens the door for many companies to provide equipment, materials, and services to the US Navy for projects almost immediately. Essentially, they can access a portion of the vast sums of money now being spent on military production.
This wasn’t unnoticed by investors: one of the companies that has been deeply involved in military production has been Australian company AML3D, whose Arcemy system was actually shown in the US Navy press release. As a result, the company’s stock price leapt upwards after the announcement. You can read more about this in our weekly leaderboard.
There will be many other winners as a result of this announcement across the industry.
One segment of 3D print companies won’t be participating is any company based in China. Military production is carefully regulated in the US, and companies from certain other countries won’t be permitted to participate. Even companies in permitted countries may not participate if they can’t adhere to the stringent regulations.
I believe the main winners will be US-based companies producing metal 3D printed parts. Two segments are likely to participate.
One is new companies that develop their own equipment but do not sell it, such as VulcanForms. Others in this category include Divergent, Freeform, Seurat, and Fabric8Labs.
The other segment would be US-based companies that are using metal 3D printing equipment from Nikon SLM, EOS, 3D Systems, etc. There would be dozens of companies in this category, including Beehive, Sintavia, ADDMAN Group, Cumberland Additive, Fathom, Proto Labs, and many more.
This is outstanding news for metal 3D printing. But can we get a similar announcement for polymer equipment?
Via US Navy
